Farm Subsidy Rulings A WTO dispute settlement panel concluded that China violated its obligations by excessively subsidizing wheat and rice production. Reaching a verdict took the panel over two years, and it may now go to a broken appellate process. U.S. agriculture groups are concerned that the victory over China’s subsidies will be for naught since the hold by Washington on WTO appellate judges means adjudication at that level will be stalled indefinitely. Still pending is a case challenging China’s method of tariff-rate quota (TRQ) administration and India’s farm subsidies. Separately, Australia and Brazil have launched a challenge to India’s sugar subsidies. Note that the impending collapse of the appellate pr...
From WPI Consulting
Communicating importance of value-added products
Facing increasing pressure to quantify the value of export promotion efforts to investors, a U.S. industry organization retained WPI to develop a quantitative model that better communicated the importance of exports. The resulting model concluded that value-added meat exports contributed $0.45 cents per bushel to the price of corn, increasing support for that sector’s financial support of WPI’s client. In addition to serving the red meat industry with this type of analysis, WPI has generated similar deliverables for the U.S. soybean and poultry/egg industries.